Work hard, breathe hard, feel wayyy better. Or, how fast-twitch exercise is the natural antidepressant you’ve been looking for.
Super basic chemistry time. Did you know that you need a healthy supply of oxygen in your blood to churn out feel-good chemicals like dopamine (short-term pleasure and motivation) and serotonin (long-term feeling of well-being)?
Indeed you do!
If you want to feel: joy, excitement, arousal, laughter, motivation, and that feeling of general contentment, efficient oxygen processing is non-negotiable.
You know what you don’t need a good supply of oxygen for? Feeling:
depressed
generally negative
exhausted
and/or indulging in the great malaise.
You can totally have low oxygen for all of that.
In order to get better oxygenation, you need to do things that require MORE oxygen, and that my friends, is where just a little hard work comes in. Because when you work hard, you breath hard, which makes you get better and stronger at breathing.
To become a more efficient user of oxygen that floods your brain with feel-good chemicals, you need to:
Increase your lung capacity by breaking up sticky points in the intercostal muscles between your ribs so you can expand your lungs freely. How? By using them! Breathe hard, break that shit up.
Increase your body’s oxygen uptake (VO2 max) by engaging in exercise that you can’t sustain for more than a minute or two. Exercise like this requires an immediate recovery period. Think jump squats, running sprints, riding a bike uphill like a bat out of hell, anything that requires a lot of power to initiate.
And you truly don’t need much of this type of movement, btw. 10 minutes, 2x a week is a great start. That would be 10 minutes total of the hard stuff. FYI–if you take a BBP signature class, you’re getting this!
Estee, jumping her backside off!
Oh and p.s. If this feels totally intimidating or really freaking hard, that’s great! Because you actually have to work less hard to get to the zone where you’ll get more efficient. So good for you!
When you have the ability to uptake a lot of oxygen, you… wait for it… feel BETTER! Good, even! (Oh, and if you're low iron? You're not getting fully oxygenated... something worth checking if you feel tired all the time.)
That's all from me, babes!
Love,
